I am sick of trying to convince my publisher what I mean by Time. In my book, I played with Time as a non-linear entity. The editor in the publishing house apparently cannot grasp that I have put my idea of Time in the form of a novel. He talks about the past, present, and does not talk at all about the future. I view these as a convolution in Time.
I try to talk about a person for whom Time is a parameter. He steps into it and out of it at will, goes along with and against it at will. He is the Protagonist and the Antagonist. He is a time traveler. This is the theme that holds the novel as one piece. I present this through the eyes of a being who kills people. But my editor does not seem to have read The Gita
Does that make it a thriller? I don’t do that genre. But the filament of Time is too deeply hidden in the story to catch the eye at first reading. I give clues that fly away like the clouds. But if I make the theme that runs through all my books too transparent, there will be no fun in writing it as fiction. That would be a treatise.
What should I do?
It is hard to portray Time as a character in a novel. Especially Time with the attributes I attach to it. It is even more difficult to convey this through characters. Now I realize that while readers give you some leeway, editors do not. One remark by the editor is that the story is told in the past tense. Absurd. Because it starts with the Present of the protagonist and ends with the death of the same gentleman. In between, he reminisces about his life. And the past life of his friend. This links it to my first novel,
“The Village of Shadows,” The second novel “The Conflict of Karna” also has reference to the river of time. There I clarify: Time is a kind of path along which most pedestrians on the temporal highway move in one direction while there are beings who are not thus confined. Time for them is like a river into which they enter and then exit to remain external to Time.
As dimensions go, Time is strange. I write books of fiction, which will hopefully bring out Time in its varied hues.